Joel Spitzer has been a leading authority in the development and implementation of smoking cessation and prevention programs for over 40 years. Far from just following and teaching the commonly held beliefs of the day, he has been a visionary who recognized early on that nicotine was an addiction while the rest of the medical and scientific community contended it was simply a habit. His unique insight allowed him to develop and implement nicotine prevention and intervention strategies that were decades ahead of their time. Participants in his clinics had success in quitting at rates that far exceeded the national average for such programs.

Currently he is serving as Educational Director for a smoking prevention and cessation Internet website, www.WhyQuit.com that averages over three million hits per month. His materials are being widely utilized on many Internet based quit sites.

Joel Spitzer has been providing smoking cessation and prevention programs since 1971, first as a volunteer speaker and then a member of the professional staff of the American Cancer Society, and later as the smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program, and then as a consultant for the Skokie Illinois Health Department and the Evanston Department of Health and Human Services, providing state funded smoking cessation clinics and seminars for the two Chicago suburban communities.

He has conducted over 350 six-session stop smoking clinics to over 4,500 participants, including programs for major corporations, medium and small sized companies, universities, health departments and numerous hospitals in the Metropolitan Chicago area.

Besides smoking cessation clinics, he has developed and presented smoking education seminars to both adult and school age groups. Since 1972, he has presented over 690 one-session seminarsto approximately 100,000 people. He has been a main speaker on the physical, psychological, and social aspects of smoking at over 30 major conferences on smoking and health throughout Illinois. He has done numerous training programs for physician and lay speakers. He has done many radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews.

He has written over 100 articles used as part of the follow-up reinforcement for participants of his Stop Smoking Clinics. Most of these articles have been compiled into an e-book that can be downloaded in an Adobe Postscript Format by clicking on http://www.whyquit.com/joel/ntap.pdf. Since August of 2005 over 4.7 million copies of his book have been downloaded off the Internet.